Automated warehouse implementation study applied to boat industry

Abstract

The industrial macroeconomic environment, where currently companies are inserted, is characterized by intense competitiveness. The success of a company depends not only on the ability to adapt to market demands, but also, on the efficiency of the practices implemented. In this way, the increase of the productivity in storage operations results on the improvement of the company's logistical processes, giving it a competitive advantage. In this context, this study emerged to reformulate the management of the production support warehouse on a recreational boat builder company (BME), analysing the advantages and/or disadvantages of the implementation of an automated warehouse in substitution of the existing manual warehouse system. Picking times between the different warehouse types as well as the percentage of losses of small parts have been tested. These parts could be stored in an automatic storage system. From this study, important conclusions were drawn for the company’s practical work in terms of warehouseproduction support and layout organization. The automatic storage system seems essential for the company to compete in a market that increasingly requires fast and error-free strategies. The results showed that investment needed to implement the automated vertical storage systems is around 45000€ and, based on the company data, considering only 8% of occupancy, the investment will be recovered on 6 years, considering only the reduction of losses. Also, the picking time reduces about 97%, from 926 seconds to 26 seconds (for the same number of pieces moved).